Pollution of the world's ground and surface water resources is a topic of national concern. Waste of all levels of toxicity is discharged or migrates into the water supply, presenting serious health risks and a significant drain on communities' financial well-being. One of the greatest threats to the water supply is the lack of proper treatment of residential waste. Residential waste includes all sorts of pollutants, including feces, bacteria, viruses, other microorganisms, soaps, detergents, and food wastes.
Previous inventions have not been able to fulfill the need for an effective yet inexpensive treatment of such waste. Municipal sewer systems are operating at capacity, and are very expensive to expand. On-site conventional septic systems are failure prone and are not very effective in returning clean water to the environment. Further, as population density increases, the space available for on-site septic systems decreases. Some residences simply dump their sewage directly into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans.
On-site systems other than septic systems and cesspools have been proposed. Axelrod, U.S. Pat. No. 4,631,133, discloses a "waste treatment device and method and using microwaves". In that system, solid and liquid waste is introduced into a chamber, where a filter captures the solids and passes the liquids out an outlet. Microwaves and electric coils are used to incinerate the solids. In sales literature accompanying the system, two chambers are disclosed such that one chamber will incinerate the waste while the other chamber collects the waste. The Axelrod system has difficulty in efficiently converting all of the solids to ash as not all of the solids are brought into direct contact with either the coils or microwaves. Further, a separate receptacle is needed to collect the unincinerated solids and ash. Even after the ash is removed, the porous ceramic filter is prone to clogging with small particles and needs to be backflushed in order to clear. Other patents, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,599,954 and 5,018,456 to Williams, disclose using hot air to dry the sludge, but are expensive, inefficient, or ill-suited for residential use.
Therefore, there is a need for an inexpensive and efficient solid and liquid waste treatment system. The present invention provides an arrangement to meet that need.